tavis: good evening from los angeles. tonight a conversation with pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author isabela wilkerson. she became the first african-american to win that honor at the time in "the new york times." her book is a look at the migration of african-americans. the acclaimed new text is called "the warmth of other suns." a conversation with isabel wilkerson coming up right now. >> all i know is his name is james and he needs extra help with his reading. >> james. >> yes. >> to everyone making a difference -- >> thank you. >> you help us all live better. >> nationwide insurance supports "tavis smiley." with every question and every

answer, nationwide insurance is proud to join tave miss it working to improve financial literacy and remove obstacles to economic empowerment one at a time. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. [captioning made possible by kcet public television] tavis: isabel wilkerson is a professor of journalism at boston university who became the first african-american woman to will win a pulitzer prize for journalism in 1994. her new text is called "the warmth of other suns." america's great migration. first of all, congratulations on -- great lakeses, an honor to have you on the program --

congratulations, an honor to have you on the program. this is huge. i mean, "new york times" best seller huge, cover of "the new york times" book review huge. everyone's talking about this now. and i underline the word now four or five times. everybody's talking about it now. but only because you had the discipline and the courage and the conviction and the commitment to tell this story, a story that is at the very epicenter what have america is. america wouldn't be without this migration and yet it took you to invest 15 years of your life to write this story. and i'm saying this not to make you blush but because for the importance of this story, to the story of america, it had not been told in this way prior to. so why has this story been sitting untold for all this time? >> well, one reason is that it began during world war i and it lasted until 1970. so it went on for a really long time. it went on for basically three

generations. for any of the journalists who might have been covering it, the ones who started covering it in the beginning weren't there at the end. it's hard to grasp what was going on. another thing is that during the waves of it people kept thinking it was going to end. but the people kept coming. so it's hard to grasp and until really after it was over with. and then finally people didn't talk about it. that's one of the biggest losses i think to african-american families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the south, they didn't look back and they often didn't tell their children about it. they didn't want to talk about it. it was too painful what they'd gone through. >> so we're really talking here about the migration of six million african-americans, although we were not african-americans at the time. >> no. tavis: call it negro, whatever we were, the migration of six million of us from the south to the north. what was the driver, the primary driver or drivers behind that massive migration from the south to the north?

>> the primary driver was that for 80 years in 1896, until after the civil rights movement, african-americans were living in a caste system that dictated their every move. they were bound by the laws of jim crow which infiltrated every aspect of interaction between blacks and whites. for example, it was against the law in birmingham for a black person and a white person to play checkers together. someone actually sat down and wrote that down as a rule. they must have seen a black person and white person playing checkers, having too much fun and said, no, we can't have this. there were black and white ambulances, there were black and white taxi cabs and there were even black and white bibles. there was a black bible and a white bible in many courthouses, to swear to tell the truth on. tavis: same bible, though? >> no, different bibles. tavis: i mean, these same bibles, one black and one white. >> correct. tavis: is there a black bible? i missed that. i thought there was just one.

they made it a black bible. >> they made it a black bible. tavis: so these six million negros were coming from where down south and going to where up north? >> well, that's one of the things that i really wanted to get a grasp of for this book is that it wasn't one migration, it was multiple migrations and it was three main ones. one was at the east coast from florida, georgia, the carolinas, virginia, up to washington, d.c., philadelphia, boston, new york. and then that was -- there was a middle one, a middle migration stream from mississippi, alabama, western georgia up to chicago, detroit, cleveland. and so that was the middle one. and then the one that's least known about and which i really enjoyed writing about was the one from louisiana and texas to california and the entire west coast. tavis: you tell this wonderful story through the individual stories of three people which i'll get to in just a second. but i'm curious at the outset what made you devote so much

time and attention to this particular subject matter. >> well, i'm a daughter of a great migration, as really the majority of african-americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. it's that massive. and many of us owe our very existence to the fabt that people migrated. and my own family's case, my mother migrated from georgia, from rome, georgia, to washington, d.c., and my father migrated from southern virginia to washington, d.c., where they met, married and here i am. and had it not been for the great migration i wouldn't exist. and yet i felt that the story wasn't really being told from the perspective of the people who had lived this. we didn't know why they left or how they made the decision to leave. what were their lives like before they left? how did they get the courage to leave the only place they've ever known for a place they'd never seen, anonymous and not welcoming to them? how did they make it once they got there? those were the questions i had

and those were the questions that gave us a sense of how the cities came to be and how so many african americans ended up in these cities, detroit, chicago, cleveland, los angeles, new york. tavis: when you say how these cities came to be, there is a narrative, a storyline, that's been written and told for years now about what this migration did to these various places that you just listed. and it's not been a sexy story, it's not been a kind narrative about what we brought with us when we came. let's talk about what that storyline has been and how you challenged that in the text. >> story has been that the migrants brought all the ills of the cities, the followsies to the cities, brought drugs, crime, and everything else you can think of as bad in the city. that's what the people brought. that's what the storyline has been for so long. partly because in the beginning they were looking at all the overcrowding and the fact that the vices were often permitted in the neighborhoods that they

were forced to live in, these small slivers of land that they were forced to live in and the police looked away as all these things were going on. but the people who were arriving were fresh from the farm or fresh from small towns, almost too fright beed to do anything -- frightened to do anything. thrmp cases where people were so overcrowded, you had multiple families living in one room. and in some places, particularly in new york, there was so much of a need of a place to live that people had to rotate use of a bed. meaning that they ended up having to -- the night shift people would come in, it was time for them to go to sleep and they'd have to tap the shoulder of someone quhoffs sleeping from the day shift and had to get up. it gaves whole new meaning to the idea of time share. tavis: yes, it does. i was fascinated when i got to chance to get into this because after katrina i was on the air here and i railed every night on this program and on "meet the press" and everyone i appeared, talking about katrina. i railed on the media. i couldn't stand the media

picking up on this term of refugees, to refer to these black men and women in new orleans who were in fact american citizens. they are not refugees. i said over and over and over again, these are american citizens. i thought it was important to make that point so we wouldn't lose sight of the fact that these people are us. they are us. >> i actually refer to them as immigrants. i refer to them as having the same kind of immigrant heart and motivations and desires and goals and dreams for themselves , as any immigrant, as any person who might have crossed the atlantic in steerage. what i'm looking at is the fact that, what is it that propels them is a human story of the classic american story and how tragic is it that they ended up having to go to far reaches of their own country in order to find the freedom that they had really -- would have been born to. and so when i use it, i'm using that in a way as a provocative term to get us to think about this migration differently. they were doing what so many other groups of people are often lauded for doing. nord, they came to these cities

without any backup at all. they took -- they lived in neighborhoods that they were confined to. they doubled up and tripled up in homes or apartments or cold water flats. they took multiple jobs and ended up making more money than the people who were there already. in other words, they were working very hard in order to survive which is the classic american story, classic immigrant story, and yet they had to do that within their own country, within the borders of our own country. and yet they were not immigrants. you're absolutely right. i actually like to use the word emgrant with an e. in many respect, ultimately this was a defection. the people were in some ways seeking political asylum from a caste system that humiliated and degraded them and the people who were perpetrating it. everybody loses when you have a caste system like that. tavis: you were obviously working on this when katrina hit. were you seeing parallels in your writing and what you were watching on tv? >> i did see parallels because

you saw people displaced from their home and also -- what's also a parallel is that the people did not want to leave. and one of the things that i think that the descendents of the migration have to realize is that they were living in an untenable situation. but they had to leave mother, father, grandparents, the land that the forbears had built for free. they had to leave a lot. and there were many sacrifices that they had to make. the same thing with katrina. people didn't want to leave new orleans. they didn't want to leave that area. but they were forced to. and in this same way these people made the ultimate sacrifice to leave the only place they'd ever known. and i'm humbled by the idea, the courage that they had in doing so. tavis: speaking of courage, these folks had a lot of courage. as i said earlier, you tell the story of the migration, these migration, i should say, through three people. in no particular order, ms. ida may. tell me about her.

>> sheafs sharecropper's wife who was terp terrible at picking cotton. she could kill snakes. tavis: sounds like me. i with have been terrible at it. >> she was terrible at picking cotton. she could ring the neck of a chicken for dinner but could not pick cotton. did not like it. her family ended up having to leave because a relative, a cuns, had been beaten to within an inch of his life because he been accused of a theft that he had not committed. the thing that they accused him of stealing turned up the next day. when her husband found out what had happened to his cousin, he went home to his wife and said, this is the last crop we're making. so they endeded up in chicago from mississippi. which is part of that chicago -- that mississippi to chicago migration. tavis: mr. george. >> george starling. he was a college student who had to drop out because in

those days there were very few places in the state of florida that would accept african-americans as students and the family could not afford to continue sending him to tallahassee for school. and so he ended up having to work as a citrus picker. once he got there, because he'd had education, he noticed that they were being ill-treated and underpaid for the hard work that they were doing. dangerous work. more dangerous than we could imagine. they had to slice together ladders to go up in these trees. people would fall and break a limb. there was no workers compensation at that time. they were only being paid 10 cents or 12 cents for a box that would go on the market for $4 or whatever. so he began to agitate for higher wages and better conditions. he got on the bad side of the growers who did not appreciate nor did they september idea of unionizing or of african-americans standing up for such things. and he had to leave and flee for his life. he left florida for harlem in

1945. tavis: and robert foster. >> robert foster. he was a surgeon who had performed ably and with distinction in the army during the korean war but he got out of the army and found that he could not practice surgery in his own hometown of monroe, louisiana. and so he set out on a course that ended up being far more treacherous than he'd anticipated, getting to -- to get to california. tavis: he ended up being somebody's doctor who we all know. >> he ended up being ray charles' doctor. tavis: great story. ray charles' doctor. were these people primarily educated, uneducated? tell me about who was making this migration >> sn >> there were clearly a range. all of them had lived under jim crow which means their education wasn't going to be what it was for the white people in the region where they were. it was very clear that it was separate and unequal. as we know. so they might have been educated but it wasn't the same kind of education that they probably -- that they would have deserved.

however, on the whole they were better educated than the people who remained. they had an impatience for the system that they were under. in fact, one of the things that you commonly would hear is that, i need to leave because i'm going to -- i'm going to die or either be killed if i stay here. in other words, they had a certain character about them, an unwillingness to accept the status quo that made them feel like they needed to leave, which is something about an immigrant mindset, which is what i'm saying about the human desire for something better. they tended to be more -- they had more resources or determination and they often were willing to work the longer hours. there was something in them like a hunger within them that would not permit them to stay and they had to go. they just simply had to go. tavis: does that say something then about the folk who stayed behind? those who didn't go? >> i think that there's a way of looking at them that is also beautiful. and that is that they were the keepers of the culture. they were the keepers of the culture. in fact, some of them would

say, we need to stay here so you have a place to come back to when you need to. i thought that was beautiful. so together this was -- this migration was in some ways the precursor to the civil rights movement, in many respects. in one way it was because it showed that this underpaid, lower level of the caste system of the south, the underpaid workers of the south had an option and were willing to take that option. they were willing to act on that option, which was to leave. secondly, those people, once they got to the north, offered in some ways leverage for the people who stayed. the people who stayed were able to have a place to go if things got tight during the civil rights movement. they could take more chances and more risks. they also were more aware of the freedoms in the north. they had not been aware of those before. before people began to leave, there was not the awareness of what even could happen in the north. what was it like in the north? it was a dream. and this now after the

migration, there was an awareness. everybody had a cousin or a great aunt or an uncle or a neighbor who had gone up north and that meant they had options they didn't have before. finally, these people who left and went up to the north were often making more money than the people in the south. and so very much as with other immigrant groups, in other words, african-americans were like anyone else, when they got away from home they sent money back home to the people who were in the south. and they helped to finance the civil rights movement. so it was this great period of time between world war i and the 1970's when the civil rights movement actually began to bear fruit, that the pressure was being put on the south. when this migration began, 90% of all african-americans living in the south, 90%. by the time it was over, nearly half were living outside of the south. they were living in that great arc from washington, d.c., up to boston and over to cleveland and chicago, detroit, and then all the way over to los angeles.

they were living anywhere but the south. that meant it was a dispersal of an entire people across the country. tavis: to your point now, i'm glad you went there, to your point about a dispersal of these black folk across the country. one doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to know that the period you're talking about happens to be america in the king years. it certainly covers a part of the king years. and one doesn't think of it in that way. when we think of dr. king fighting for justice and equality and for the rights of black folk we think primarily of black folk in the south and that's of course where dr. king was based. but it's fascinating to think now as we listen to you talk, that while king was leading this movement, negros were getting out of the south as fast as they could at that time. >> at that very moment. he had, too. he went to boston university and he had the exposure to the freedoms of the north in the early 1950's and he met his wife in the north. so that even had -- there's a connection there between the great migration. could you say he was part of the grey great migration for a

time. then he went back to fight form moment of truth in the south as well. tavis: to your point now, were there folk like king who escaped the south for whatever purpose, whatever reason, whatever period of time and then felt called back to the south? >> i must say most did not. most in that original migration left for good. some even changed their name when they left and they didn't look back. which is why the story often was not told to the succeeding generations and i think it needs to be told. the entire country needs to be aware of the sacrifices made by the people and the ultimate impact that this had on the country. tavis: since we're talking about king for the moment, in one of his famous speeches, king says, talking about the reason why he was fighting so hard for the right to vote for black people, king argues that, the negro in the south cannot vote and the negro in the north, king says, has nothing for which to vote. which raises the question of how the negros were treated when they got up north. >> when they got up north, they faced tremendous resistance and hostility.

they were hemmed in into roped-off intercities that came to be known as ghettos. whenever they tried to escape and get into other neighborhoods, obviously there were fire bombings and all kinds of things as an example of a case in cicero where a family, a middle class family tried to move in and the people -- they were not permitted to move in, ultimately when they got their things into the second floor apartment, it turned out that the people, several thousand people, often of eastern european descent, newly aarrived themselves and not different from the people who arrived from the south, they were all people of the land, all trying to survive in the city, they tall lie went into this apartment and -- they actually went into this apartment and took everything out, threw it out the second floor window. piano, furniture, chairs, even ripped out the faucets and toilets and radiaters and threw them all out, set everything on fire and set the entire

building on fire which rendered the white residents homeless. this was in cicero in the early 1950's. they met tremendous resistance. part of it was because of the arrival of the people who were so poorly paid in the south put pressure on the north. it put pressure on the people who were scuffling and trying to survive just having arrived from other parts of the world and it meant that it could potentially press down the wages of people in the north. it was all a structural thing. it wasn't always personal. but it played out in really ugly ways often. what haps was the people met resistance from african-americans, the small group of african-americans who were there already, who were concerned about their own tenuous state and other groups that might be competing with them. they met so much resistance that it's a wonder that they survived. they distribute people who migrated were more likely to be married than the people who were in the north already. they were more likely to be

raising their children in two-parent households. all these things are only recently being discovered as sociologists and others look at the facts from the census data. a lot new is coming out about them. tavis: i started this conversation by doing what i could in two seconds to give you i think the props that you deserve, what you've done with this -- what will be a classic and historic text. but i don't want people to think i was being hyperbolic. let me ask it as a question. tell me, situate for me this migration in the making, mat touring of america -- the maturing of america. >> it is hard to separate out the legacy of this great migration because it's so imbedded in our culture. and to me, with any mass movement of people, bun of the -- one of the things you look for is what are the touch points in society that left -- where it left its mark? there are certain things we take for granted that would not have existed without the

migration. motown would not have existed because barry gourdy, the founder of it, his parents had migrated from georgia to detroit where he founded motown. where did he get this? children from the great my grafplgtse diana ross, jackson. all of them were children of the great migration. jazz would not exist. miles davis, his parents migrated from arkansas to illinois where he had the luxury of being able to practice for hours upon hours. he never would have been able to do that in the cotton country of arkansas. same goes for monk whose parents brought him from north carolina to harlem when he was 5 years old, where he got the luxury, the self-injell dull jens of being able to, you might argue, being able to learn to -- self-indulgence of being able to become the great musician he was that he wouldn't have been able to do in north carolina. and john coal train. john coal train migrated from north carolina to philadelphia at 17 where he got his first alto sax.

what would music be if he hadn't gotten that? tavis: music is just one genre. >> you can't start with literature, politics, on so many levels it's affected our society. tavis: what's the abiding lesson? what's the abiding lesson for black people of this migration? in 2010? >> i would hope that it would encourage every african-american family north and south to examine its history. this was a migration that had no leader. it was a leaderless migration. people made decisions on the basis of what was in their heart and i think this is a story of inspiration that says that so much power is within these individual people, one by one, multiplied by six million, ended up helping to change this country. and that's an inspiration for anyone of any race, particularly for black families. people need to go back and talk with the oldest people in their families and find out what are the stories before it's too late. i felt a great urgency in

working on this book because i knew people were passing on and i didn't have so much time to get to them. that would be the lesson i would be seeing in. it tavis: she made history back in 1994 when she won that pulitzer prize and now she has a book out that everybody is talking about. it's called "the warmth of other suns." the enic story of america's great migration. it is, to my mind, a gift to awful us in america. written by the isabel wilkerson. thanks for the book and honored to have you on the show. >> thank you for having me. tavis: it's my pleasure. thanks the show for tonight. until next time, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis at pbs.org. tavis: hi, join me next time for a conversation with actor and author of a new book, "my mommy hung the moon," jamie lee curtis. we'll see you then. >> all i know is his name is james and he needs extra help with his reading. >> i'm james.

>> yes. >> to everyone making a difference -- >> thank you. >> you help us all live better. >> nationwide insurance supports "tavis smiley." with every question and every answer, nationwide insurance is proud to join tave miss it bork -- working to improve financial literacy and remove objects cams to economic empowerment one conversation at a time. nationwide is on your side. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.